Three weeks before Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Georgia in August of 2008, the Russian government launched a massive cyber attack. The first attack was a DDoS (Distributive Denial of Service) attack on the Georgian president’s website. It succeeded in bringing it down for 24 hours, but bringing the site down was not really the point. The point was to show how powerful they were and to intimidate the Georgian government.
By coincidence (?),two days before Russia launched its all out attack on Ossetia, an explosion occurred on a pipeline that delivers oil to Georgia. This pipeline, the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, had been opposed by Russia because it was seen to undermine their control of the Georgian oil supply. There is some disagreement as to whether this was a terrorist attack or a cyber attack. A cyber attack could cause an explosion by manipulating safety parameters on control devices. This would be similar to the Stuxnet attack that compromised control systems on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and eventually led to their destruction. However, the Stuxnet attack was not discovered until 2010. That said, Stuxnet-like malware had been in development in many countries since 2005, so the cyber attack angle can’t be completely ruled out.
The physical invasion of Georgia coincided with numerous cyber attacks on Georgian government websites. News sites were also compromised and used to transmit pro-Russian information. Servers in Georgia and other countries were taken over. If servers in other countries were hosting Georgian sites, they were taken down as well. This attack on the communication infrastructure, combined with the bombing of cell towers, quickly isolated Georgia from the rest of the world. News could only be disseminated through independent bloggers using foreign servers. The invasion itself was scheduled to coincide with the summer Oly ..
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